CLIL is not new. On the contrary, it has been used since the days of Ancient Rome to provide linguistically-enhanced education which results in certain youngsters leaving school with the plurilingual ability to use two or more languages. Societies, knowing that some citizens should have the gift of speech in different languages have long been involved with forms of CLIL.
However, these educational opportunities have very often been restricted to small groups of youngsters who had been picked, for whatever reasons, to join the socio-economic and political elites of a society. In other words, if you look back in time, even in your own country you will probably find that education had at some point been geared to providing an elite with the ability to use certain additional languages. This would have reflected a view that additional language learning should not be available to all types of people. In some societies the power of people having access to languages has and continues to be viewed as a loaded weapon. In other societies it may be viewed as a key to success, for the individuals and the wider societies.
This is one reason why some varieties have developed, and it is one reason why certain European youngsters, both past and present, have been denied access to effective language learning. Even now, in some European societies, it is the privileged schools, often private, sometimes government supported, which are still in a position to hand-pick certain youngsters to excel in additional languages. And even now, this education can pay dividends when it comes to the opportunities any child has when entering the labour markets.
CLIL offers us all an opportunity to dismantle such negative and unjust legacies. It provides all youngsters, regardless of social and economic positioning, the ability to acquire and learn additional languages in a meaningful way.
Frankly, in some countries people often underestimate a child's ability to learn languages. The brain offers enormous capacity for languages. If a child learns different languages then this will develop the thinking processes within the brain itself. This is why the ability to 'think' in different languages is so often seen as an advantage.
What we need to realize is that the ability to use different languages, even to a modest extent, will almost certainly have a positive impact on the youngster's thinking processes. Being able to see the same phenomenon from different angles, as though looking through different language 'spectacles', can have a very interesting impact on our ability to think and understand. In other words, being able to think in more than one language can give advantages to a youngster in terms of thinking and studying.
In CLIL, we provide a situation in which the attention of the child is on some form of learning activity which is not the language itself. So what we are doing is providing the opportunity to learn to 'think' in the language, not just learn about the language itself as the major learning focus. |
Our societies are changing very fast. The world is inter-connected in ways never seen before, and right now the pressures are immense. Education has to respond very quickly to these changes. Children and young people are very similar across the world in terms of their needs and aspirations. In this new global linguistic order where English has such a powerful role to play in, for example, global youth culture, the situation in a country like Argentina is not actually so different to others.
We have met rather many teachers of English in Argentina just recently. They have voiced the need to do something to boost English language teaching. There is no CLIL model for export, which is one reason why it is appearing to be so successful in different continents and countries because as an approach it adapts to local conditions. Relevant? Certainly. |
